IN NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, George Orwell imagined a world divided into three blocs — Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia — each in a state of perpetual warfare, which allows all three to maintain totalitarian control over their own populations. Orwell intended his novel to be a warning. But, watching Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and their allies parade together this week in Beijing, it felt more like prophecy.
President Putin used the term “Eurasia” this week in his speech to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), before the parade to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in 1945. It brought together the Russian president, the Chinese leader, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. For Kim, it was the first time that he had attended a multilateral event in his 14-year rule. For Xi and Putin, it afforded a public display of the “old friends” whose partnership grows closer the more each grows estranged from Donald Trump.
Putin, increasingly strained by the cost of his war in Ukraine, used the occasion to demand a “new security system” for Eurasia. His war, he claimed, was not sparked by his own invasion in 2022, but by a Western-backed “coup” in Kyiv and NATO’s attempt to swallow Ukraine. It was perfect Orwellian inversion: war presented as peace, aggression as defence.
Xi’s message was more subtle, but no less pointed. His government has been campaigning to reframe the history of the Second World War. “China and the Soviet Union were the mainstay of resistance against Japanese militarism and German Nazism,” Xi explained, reasserting a perspective often omitted from Western histories.
There was more to all this than rhetoric. This was the largest SCO summit since the organisation’s founding in 2002. It included leaders from India, Iran, Belarus, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe. There were even two repressive NATO members: Turkey and Serbia. The leaders of Russia and India arrived holding hands.
Once derided a mere talking shop for countries irritated by the United States, the bloc is now being positioned as the embryo of an alternative world system. Xi offered its members $1.4 billion in grants and loans, proposed a new development bank, and urged them to reject “cold war mentality, bloc confrontation, and bullying”.
President Trump, ironically, has accelerated the process. His tariffs (on friends and foe alike), his suspicion of multilateral institutions, his erratic diplomacy — all have opened a space that China has eagerly filled, presenting itself as the defender of free trade, of the United Nations, even of the “international rule of law”.
It feels like a concerted attempt to build a rival order to the American hegemony that has held sway since the end of the Cold War — a rival system of power, with its own myths, its own memory, its own mechanisms of control, with leaders who claim their repression is “defensive”, their censorship “protective”, their wars “preventive”. The logic of Nineteen Eighty-Four endures.
Of course, all this may turn out to be a passing diplomatic shuffle. Its members have a history of falling out: Russia with China, China with India, India with Pakistan, and so forth. But Orwell warned us that the future might be a boot stamping on a human face forever. The boots marching in Beijing should make us uncomfortable.
